<snip>
> At this point I'm concluding that something in the code is hard-coded to
> look for $PREFIX/share/applications/kde. I can't find anything obvious or
> explicit. I've looked hard and am stumped.
>
> I would appreciate any help in this challenge. :)
>
> Thanks!
>
> Darrell

Have you looked through the CMake files?  There are a few places where
CMake variables are written into TDE via autogenerated #defines.

Other than that the class name you are probably looking for is
KStandardDirs, as it stores all search directories.  See
http://trinitydesktop.org/docs/trinity/current/kdelibs/kdecore/html/classKStandardDirs.html
for documentation.

Tim